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Saturday, June 2, 2012

"You like me, you really like me!"

Alright,
so, in my defense of Catcher in the Rye
(here) I took the position that you don’t
have to like the main character in order to love the book they star in. But
after reading some other great books whose characters I ended up hating (see my
take on Stegner’s Angle of Repose, here, or Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, at the
tail end of this post) I may be ready to walk that back a little bit.

Maybe
I love Catcher in the Rye not just for its literary chops, but also because
I have a soft spot for Holden, and because I relate to his sense of humor. I
loved Angle of Repose as a work of literature, but hated the
grandmother with the white hot passion of a thousand suns. Okay, that’s too
strong- but it does aptly describe how I felt about just about
every character in Wuthering Heights.
Now those characters were so unlikeable that the
whole book was doomed for me.

On
the other hand, you look at a book like A
Bell for Adano, which I reviewed here, and a novel that might have scored an
8 or 9 out of 10, felt to me like an 11, simply because of the main character, Major
Joppollo- the man was just downright likeable, and did everything right,
against all kinds of odds. I also just re-read To Kill A Mockingbird, and good
grief, Atticus Finch was twice as good as I remembered him- twice the man I’ll
ever be. That’s a book filled with
great characters, and I’d rank it in my Top 5 all-time reads for that reason.

So
where do you come down on likeable characters? Do you need them? Is a book
doomed without them? Are they just ‘nice to have,’ but not really necessary?
Tell us in the comments.